Archive for April, 2010

Lindsay and I went to NYC for my birthday last weekend. I was turning 30 and had never been, despite the fact that everyone else in my life had already been, so it was about time that I made it to the city that never sleeps.

We stayed in the Four Points just off of Times Square. We were only a short walk away from Central Park and managed to make it to the Museum of Natural History, the Met, MOMA and the Guggenheim – and the Intrepid Air, Space and Sea measure for good measure (I believe good measure for those last three is all done in knots).

We also saw Avenue Q – apparently I’m using the internet wrong as I type.

Running a mail server is hard work. This is largely because it puts you on the front line of the battle with the internet’s biggest scourge: spam. My recommendation: don’t do it.

When I setup a new web site and domain, or when I am helping another organization setup their Email etcetera my preference is to sign-up for Google Apps and Gmail Email.

What is now Google Apps started with “Gmail For Your Domain” and now includes Gmail, Docs (documents), Groups, Sites and Chat. The standard edition is free for 50 accounts or less, above that it’s $50 per user per year.

The best part is Google handles all the spam filtering, gives users a number of Gigs of storage (7Gigs the last time I checked) and handles all the redundancy, backup etc, but it is worth noticing their no enterprise-esh recovery options.

There is even a Canadian connection in that Lakehead University in Thunder Bay was one of the first major domains to migrate everyone’s E-Mail. Many of the faculty objected to their Email being routed through the united states, but at least they were able to setup their iPhones with their work Email on Christmas day.

The most compelling reasons is that you get your mail via the best web interface going, as well as POP, IMAP, and SMTP servers that are all encrypted. Plus I’m a big fan of Google calendar system — I’m a big fan of calendar’ing systems in general.

Google Docs can be a bit of “lifestyle” change, but if you are interested working on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online it’s a great service, espcially if you want to either work with others collaboratively in a work-flow or for sharing with an audience. Read more...(973 words, 6 images, estimated 3:54 mins reading time)

I’m trying to reduce the load on my server as much as possible for the inevitable day when the site goes viral. I’ve also been tracking the whole site via the excellent AW Stats tool at mattclare.ca/awstats/awstats.pl — which is intentionally public.

I’ll keep using AW Stats for a bit, but once the site’s viral, it’s coming off — or when I get around to it. We’ll see which comes first.

About Matt Clare:

Matt Clare is a Canadian Technologist who is focused on building, deploying and refining the best tools possible for teachers and learners in higher education. Advocate of making all web content accessible by making the creation process easy.